Xgimi Aura 2 review

Xgimi’s debut Aura projector caused quite a stir on its release in 2022. Its combination of a tidy ultra short throw design, aggressive pricing, laser lighting, powerful built-in sound and the ability to display a mammoth 90 per cent of the colour spectrum used in most HDR mastering added something genuinely new to the affordable UST projector space.

Now the Aura is back in the shape of the cunningly-named Aura 2 – and this time round it’s packing more brightness, even more colour, and the second generation of Xgimi’s innovative Dual Light technology.

Price

So long as you’re buying it in the UK or US, the Xgimi Aura 2 looks very reasonably priced at £2459 / $2699 for an ultra short throw projector that appears to have genuine designs on being a serious home cinema machine, as well as a convenient big-screen living room TV replacement option.

It’s much less good value in Australia, though, where it’s currently listed at $6399 – a price much higher than you get if you simply convert the UK or US prices into the Australian dollar.

Design

The Aura 2 has received a complete design overhaul from its predecessor, with massively more living room-friendly results. Out are the black back and sides, sharp angles and rather industrial-looking metal top plate of the original Aura. In, is a lovely subtle beige – sorry, ‘Moonlight Sand’ – colour scheme with rounded-off corners and a soft felt finish. You can’t even see the lens aperture on the top edge when you’re not watching the projector, as it’s hidden away behind a motorised retracting cover when the Aura 2 is in standby. This also means there’s less chance of the lens getting covered in dust or scratched if you have to move it around, of course.

Between and around the expanses of felt are some attractive metallic highlights, while the felt has been designed to be water-proof (to a point!), dust-proof and resistant to oils.

The projector’s rear edge, as in the one that faces out into the room, houses a Harman Kardon speaker system, and Xgimi has even gone to the trouble of shipping the Aura 2 with a premium remote control handset with a neat two-tone black and polished metal finish.

Features

Let’s kick off this section by looking at how the Aura 2 moves things on from the original Aura. For starters, its 4K (via DLP’s XPR technology) images can get a fair bit brighter, claiming a peak light output of 2300 ISO lumens versus the 1800 ISO lumens of the Aura 1. It also claims to kick up the colour coverage from the already heady heights of 90 per cent of the DCI-P3 spectrum on the first Aura to 99 per cent. Being able to see essentially the same colour range at home – at sizes claimed to stretch to 150 inches – as you might also hope to see in a premium digital cinema environment is quite a thing.

The Aura 2 also, crucially, adopts – or rather adapts, as it turns out – the Dual Light technology originally deployed to such eye-catching effect on Xgimi’s Horizon lifestyle projectors. This hybrid wide and narrow spectrum approach seamlessly blends light sources to create a more natural image with allegedly enhanced brightness, contrast and colour accuracy.

Where the Dual Light tech on Xgimi’s Horizon S Max and S Pro projectors combines tri-laser lighting with LED lighting, though, the Aura 2 combines dual laser and phosphor light sources. The Horizon versions of Dual Light have yielded really striking results, especially where colour is concerned, so hopefully the Aura 2 adaptation will do the same.

Xgimi claims to have equipped the Aura 2 with a new “cinema-grade” image quality optimisation engine as well, which includes intelligent dynamic noise reduction routines, skin tone correction, DCI-P3 colour gamut point calibration, colour temperature correction for the video world’s preferred D65 white point, and technologies to ensure the image isn’t troubled by scattered sparkles or colour fringing issues. There’s even a motion estimation/motion compensation (MEMC) processing system to help out if you find 24p movie playback looks too juddery.

Xgimi also states that each Aura 2 has been colour calibrated before leaving the factory, with the resulting colour accuracy claimed to be below a Delta 2000 error of one – anything under three is considered imperceptible to the human eye.

With so many impressive picture specifications to its name, you won’t be surprised to learn that the Aura 2 is ready, willing and able to play high dynamic range sources. In fact, as well as the basic HDR10 format, it can also support both the HLG format commonly used for live streams, and the premium Dolby Vision format that adds extra scene-by-scene picture information to help compatible displays perform better. As usual with Dolby Vision on projectors, you can tell the Dolby Vision system the size and gain level of your screen to help fine-tune its results.

Dolby isn’t the only third-party picture expert Xgimi has worked with in developing the Aura 2. The projector also carries IMAX Enhanced accreditation, meaning it has been tested by IMAX as capable of doing justice to images mastered using IMAX Enhanced’s specific clarity and brightness-enhancing system. IMAX Enhanced titles include a few 4K Blu-rays and most Marvel titles on Disney+.

The Aura 2’s UST optical design is capable of producing a 100-inch image with just 17.8cm between it and your wall and screen. Getting such a big image from such a small throw distance helps it deliver a big-screen experience more akin to watching a huge TV than a traditional home theatre projector. Taking the idea that it’s really an alternative to a traditional TV option further, the Aura 2 also sports both a built-in smart system and a strikingly potent integrated speaker set-up. The former is the Android TV 11.0 platform, while the latter consists of a Harman Kardon-designed 4 x 15W, 2.0-channel arrangement capable of playing back both Dolby Atmos and DTS Virtual:X soundtracks.

Android TV smart systems are notoriously inconsistent on projectors and, unfortunately, the service on the Aura 2 arrives missing some pretty key apps. In particular, our sample didn’t carry either Netflix or Disney+ – the latter being a particularly unfortunate loss given that it’s one of the few sources out there able to make use of the Aura 2’s IMAX Enhanced status. UK users will also miss the lack of functioning Freeview Play, BBC iPlayer, ITVX and Channel 4 catch-up service apps.

The built-in Android smart system is ‘fed’, of course, via integrated wi-fi support, but there’s also support for content on your smart devices via GoogleCast, Magicast and Bluetooth 5.2, or via sources connected to the impressive roster of three USBs and three HDMI ports. One of the HDMIs supports eARC functionality should you want to pass Dolby Atmos or DTS soundtracks out to a soundbar or separate audio system.

The HDMIs can take in 4K feeds at up to 60Hz speeds but, as usual with projectors, there’s no support for VRR or 4K/120Hz. There is, though, a low latency mode on the Aura 2 that gets the time the projector takes to render images down to as low as 20ms. This isn’t quite as fast as many TVs now manage, but it’s one of the lowest figures we’ve seen from a projector and leaves you with precious little potential for blaming input lag for your gaming fails.

While ultra short throw projectors are unusually practical projector solutions for most domestic spaces, they can be a faff to set up. Happily, though, the Aura 2 goes much further than most of its rivals to minimise the hassle of initial set-up with its ISA 5.0 for UST technology. This is essentially a one-click automated set-up system able to auto-optimise focus, keystone correction and screen alignment, as well as carrying features to compensate for both bumps in your wall and its colour.

Last but not least – for some people, anyway – on the Aura 2’s lengthy feature list is support for 3D, in both the Frame Packing and Side By Side formats.

Picture

As with the original Aura, the Aura 2 manages to excite the home cinema fan in us without ultimately containing its exuberance quite enough to hold on to five-star status.

The Aura 2 really does make an entrance. No sooner have you got over the cool way its lens cover glides smoothly back than you find yourself staring at some of the most spectacular images we’ve seen on a UST projector.

The general brightness delivered by the Aura 2’s laser optics feels higher than Xgimi’s claimed 2300 lumens – and that’s even before you spot the strange High Performance brightness boosting feature tucked away in the picture menus. Activate this and, after a moment of darkness while the projector does whatever it needs to in order to take its light output to another level, the resulting images blaze off the screen with an intensity that makes some rivals with way more quoted brightness look insipid by comparison.

After the initial wow, though, we start to find this brightness boost feature a bit fatiguing and unhelpful for serious movie viewing. It also causes quite distracting amounts of subtle shading and blending information to get ‘clipped’ out of the brightest peaks of high dynamic range pictures, and because it essentially removes a wide colour filter from the projector’s optical system, colours lose some of their depth and richness. As well as giving you an eyeful of just how intense even a quite affordable projector can be these days, though, the Brightness Boost option does actually prove very good at helping the Aura 2’s pictures punch through ambient light. So much so that you may well decide to leave it on for most of the time when viewing in bright rooms – so long as you remember to turn it off for serious dark room movie nights.

The longer we spend ogling the Aura 2’s pictures, the more it starts to strike us that, while its brightness is more impressive than expected from Xgimi’s 2300 Lumens claim, a couple of other aspects of its pictures also contribute greatly to their intensity – and perhaps explain why the brightness seems higher than Xgimi says it is.

One is the projector’s colour response. This reaches colours with HDR footage that precious few other projectors we’ve seen can match, combining exceptional tonal volume and range with enough subtlety (with the Brightness Boost feature off) to give bright, colourful images an excellent sense of detail and three-dimensionality – both at an individual object and overall picture level.

The other equally welcome strength of the Aura 2 is its black level response. Dark shots and dark parts of otherwise bright images appear with much less greyness hanging over them than we’ve come to expect from bright projectors (which have no local dimming technologies available to them, of course). This real contrast instantly makes dark scenes look more convincing and consistent with bright scenes than we often see with HDR-friendly projectors – especially as it’s achieved without causing either faint shadow details to get crushed out of the picture or any significant brightness instability.

The startling punch of the Aura 2’s HDR images is especially strong with Dolby Vision material, which often looks genuinely stunning. Especially if you’ve taken the time to tell the projector the size and gain of your screen (if you’re using one). In fact, we’d go so far as to say the Aura 2 gives us one of the most compelling and obvious examples we’ve seen of just what a difference Dolby Vision can make. If all pictures looked as good on the Aura 2 as they do in Dolby Vision, we might have been looking at a five-star review here.

Of course, though, the fact that we were so appreciative of the Aura 2’s Dolby Vision step-up kind of makes the point that Xgimi’s handling of HDR10 isn’t perhaps as brilliant as it might be. In particular, while colours on the Aura 2 look consistently spectacular, they don’t always look entirely natural or perfectly in balance. Skin tones especially can look either a little jaundiced or plasticky, depending on which picture preset you’re using, and occasionally a very richly saturated tone can look over-exposed. The Movie preset helps with the colour balancing a bit, but strangely can look worse with skin tones than the Standard mode. In fact, we found that we preferred the Standard preset with non-Dolby Vision sources, as this setting’s relatively cool tone seems to better suit the projector’s core tuning/optics.

Even the improvements provided by Dolby Vision sources don’t result in absolute colour perfection. Some shots still don’t look quite right, though it’s harder to put your finger on exactly why this is the case.

It’s important to add at this point that Xgimi has included a Professional Grade Colour Accuracy option in the picture menus. This is a very welcome addition to the Aura 2’s features, and it really does improve the balance of tones across the image, as well as making colours look much more accurate and less noisy. Unfortunately, though, it also injects more greyness into dark scenes and adds a faint reddish hue to the image that goes beyond adding more warmth to the image’s colour presentation. So while we hugely applaud this effort by Xgimi, the professional colour accuracy mode still doesn’t feel like it’s in step with the projector’s core tuning/characteristics.

A couple of smaller issues find traces of DLP’s rainbow effect, where stripes of red, green and blue can flit over bright image highlights, and the appearance of some distracting processing side effects if you try to use the Aura 2’s motion processing system. The rainbow effect isn’t as pronounced as it might have been for such a contrast-rich projector, though, making it only a significant issue for people particularly susceptible to seeing it. And the Aura 2’s judder while showing 24p sources with the motion processing turned off is seldom pronounced enough to become a major distraction.

Sound

The Xgimi Aura 2’s cooperation with Harman Kardon on the projector’s built-in audio system has paid off pretty handsomely. For starters, the sound field it produces spreads far beyond the projector’s bodywork. This is especially true in the horizontal plane, to left and right, but there’s at least a hint of verticality to the presentation too, creating a wall of sound that also pushes forward in an immersive wave across your room.

We even feel a sense of some ambient effects sounding as if they are coming from down the side of our seating position, rather than the sound only existing in front of us.

Details are placed with clarity and solid placement precision within the pleasingly large soundstage, while vocals remain locked in place at the heart of the action, right where they should be. Ambient effects are particularly well handled as well, appearing slightly outside and beyond the main mix details.

While pleasingly cinematic for most of the time, though, heavy and extended bass sounds can overwhelm the Aura 2’s sound momentarily, suddenly making things sound a bit congested and muffled. Especially as the speakers aren’t as good at projecting bass as they are the other elements in the sound mix. Voices, too, can sound a little constrained in the projector’s bodywork compared with the rest of a mix’s details.

Verdict

As with its predecessor, the Aura 2 prioritises exuberance over naturalism a little too much at times to secure a truly unreserved recommendation. Its Android smart system lacks some key apps, too. It’s never less than seriously enjoyable to watch, though, and the unusually impressive way it’s able to adapt to both light and dark room conditions also makes it so consistently usable that it ends up feeling like great value.

SCORES

• Picture 4
• Sound 4
• Features 3

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